Re: Why did the PGP Web of Trust fail?

On Wed, 2018-06-20 at 21:40 +0200, Henry Story wrote:
> > On 20 Jun 2018, at 21:30, Liam R. E. Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:
> > 
> yes, that's kind of the point of the reasoning in the post. 
> It looks like you you stopped at the first part, 

no, i read the whole article, don't worry :)


> That is the point at which I consider the Verifiable Claims work as
> say
> an improved PGP. But then one gets to the point of the skills
> required to
> verify a claim, which is what leads to the instutitonal trust.
> 
> The institutional Web of Trust is developed in the last part of this
> longer
> post "From Digital Sovereignty to the Web of Nations"
> https://medium.com/cybersoton/from-digital-sovereignty-to-the-web-of-
> nations-61fbc28d79cd

(typo on that page, the "will" is missing from teh categorical
imperative!)

There a danger in the rhetoric here of sounding as if the word
Sovereign is more important than the reality described - see the film
"Zeitgeist" for lots of really bad examples of this rhetorical
phenomenon, where e.g. a large proportion of the film depends on the
idea that Son and Sun sound the same... in Hebrew and Greek (they
don't). I think that in a digital context by sovereign you really mean,
in control of, rather than, say, owning by divine or heredtory right.
Perhaps my view differs because i live in a country whose head of state
is a sovereign, the Queen :)


> You'll see there in the comments by Philip Sheldrake who asked how
> that ties
> into the Verifiable Claims. When you look at my answer there you
> should
> see how the whole thing fits together :-)

i think i do see what you are saying. It's a very diferent take than
i've heard from the VC WG so far, which is interesting. Or maybe i
haven't paid enough attention :)

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Staff contact for Verifiable Claims WG, SVG WG, XQuery WG, CSS WG
Improving Web Advertising: https://www.w3.org/community/web-adv/
Personal: awesome vintage art: http://www.fromoldbooks.org/

Received on Thursday, 21 June 2018 03:42:35 UTC